You might think that the primary factor needed to make a band work is, you know, actually being able to get together to make music. Not for Dirty Three. It is 12 years since the Australian instrumental trio last released an album, 2012’s Toward the Low Sun, but it isn’t for lack of trying that their reunion has taken so long. Drummer Jim White lives in New York, guitarist Mick Turner in Melbourne and violinist Warren Ellis in Paris. And they’ve all been busy: White as a solo artist, in duo Xylouris White and collaborating with the likes of Bill Callahan; Turner as a painter and solo artist; Ellis, most famously, as right-hand man to Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds and in their film scoring partnership. “When someone was available, the other two weren’t,” says Ellis, looking wild of hair and resplendent in a ruby Fila zip top and blue Peter Jackson suit in a London pub. “For some reason, I think that really worked in our favour.”
Having limited opportunities to get together meant limited opportunities to repeat themselves – and from day one, Dirty Three sought to push the limits of the three-piece. The Melbourne scene stalwarts formed in Ellis’s kitchen at the turn of 1992 – Ellis says none of them can remember when exactly – and improvised for five hours ahead of playing three sets of background music at a friend’s bar that night. “I remember asking Mick, ‘God, how long do you think we’ll be together?’” says Ellis, drinking tea containing precisely a dot of milk. “And he said, ‘Well, as long as what we think we’re doing is good. When we start making shit, it’s time to stop.’” They quickly made their name with their lyrical, furious interplay, shades of Celtic and Greek folk music, a shared love of Impulse! records and jazz drummer Elvin Jones, as well as for their knife-edge danger and flayed emotion, with Ellis in particular playing as if it were always the last night of his life. They inspired love and hate – “We’d play shows where not even half the audience liked us, and the other half wanted to kill us,” says Ellis – and found themselves in what he calls a post-Nirvana boom for various shades of alternative music made by kindred spirits, supporting the likes of Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys when they came to Australia. The early albums, 1993’s self-titled, 1995’s Sad and Dangerous and 1996’s Horse Stories, managed the rare feat of capturing their live energy.
